Annamaria Badenchini has the best of all reasons to be thankful today.

She's alive.

This afternoon, she'll be surrounded by about 70 family members as they celebrate Thanksgiving, knowing their prayers have been answered.

For a time last July, making it to Thanksgiving Day wasn't a certainty.

Badenchini, 41, was on her way home July 19, heading north on the Palisades Parkway between exits 12 and 13, when she came upon a large planter in the roadway.

She swerved to miss it and her Chevy Tahoe flipped and rolled through trees in the median and came to a stop on its roof near the southbound lanes of traffic. She was alone in her vehicle and no others were involved.

Badenchini was still in the wreckage, with serious face and leg injuries, when her guardian angels arrived.

Four men ran to her vehicle and pulled her free.

They acted just in time.

Seconds after were they clear of the wreck, her vehicle exploded in flames.

The four — Todd Pezzementi and Colton Reitzes of Stony Point, John Ferriello of Pearl River, and Fausto Alvarez of Manhattan — have been honored for risking their own lives to rescue Badenchini. She says she also owes her life to an unidentified nurse who stopped at the scene and applied a tourniquet to her leg.

As if on cue, firefighters from Hillcrest Fire Department arrived to battle the fire while Spring Hill Ambulance personnel and paramedics cared for Badenchini and made another split-second decision: It would be faster to drive her to Westchester Medical Center than to wait for a helicopter.

At the hospital, doctors initially thought her leg might have to be amputated.

Dr. David Asprinio of University Orthopaedics in Hawthorne believed he could save her leg. Four months later, after repeated surgeries, Badenchini has two rods, a steel plate and three screws in her leg and foot, as well as a chunk of bone cement that will be replaced with a bit of bone from her good leg in yet another operation on Nov. 30. Plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Koch repaired her facial injuries and will perform more facial surgery down the road.

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Badenchini hopes to be able to put weight on the leg after her next operation and return to work in the accounting department of A&P in Montvale, N.J., early next year. "They've been very good to me," Badenchini says, adding A&P sent her family "a truckload of food" while she was in the hospital.

After her discharge from Westchester Medical Center on Aug. 10, she spent an additional three weeks at Helen Hayes Hospital, close to home in West Haverstraw.

It turns out that Badenchini knew two of the men who pulled her from the wreck. She attended North Rockland High School with Todd Pezzementi, and the Badenchinis had met Colton Reitzes at a graduation party two days before the crash.

Fausto Alvarez visited her at Westchester Medical Center, and Pezzementi came to see her at Helen Hayes. She even met John Ferriello's entire family.

Badenchini says she's been given a gift in that she doesn't remember the accident or a few weeks after it.

What she does remember — piecing together what she's been told by her husband, Rich, and daughter Ashley, 20 — is how all those people exhibited selflessness, compassion and professionalism to save her life and how countless restaurants and businesses helped organizations help her family.

"I know I'm blessed every day, but I just don't know how to thank them all," Badenchini says during an interview in the living room of her home on Peck Street in West Haverstraw. The house has been in her family since her grandfather came from Sicily in 1954. A year later, her grandmother, Angela Quattrocchi, followed with six of her children, including Badenchini's father, Stefano Quattrocchi. They walked through the front door on Peck Street for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, 1955. As joyful as that holiday was, Badenchini has lost both her grandmothers on Thanksgiving Day — Angela Quattrocchi in 1998 and Elizabeth Drexler in 2004.

Badenchini's dad and mother Kathryn live right next door, in the house where Annamaria grew up. Daughter Ashley is delaying the start of her nursing education until September to help her mom. With her parents, brothers David and Angelo Quattrocchi, and husband Rich and 12-year-old son Christopher close by, she says, "there's so much positive energy," including from her friends.

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One, Teresa Wargo, visits regularly, coaxing her to "go for a walk." That, Badenchini says, means Wargo gets to push her in her wheelchair.

That's another dimension to the thanks being given this year by Badenchini and her family.

"I've known all my life how Haverstraw comes together, but I was never on the other side of it before," she says.

She got out of Helen Hayes Hospital on a Wednesday and the next night was at the Hillcrest Fire Department, when they honored her rescuers. That Saturday — on Labor Day weekend — members of a succession of North Rockland area bands dedicated an annual benefit concert at Bowline Park to Badenchini, raising funds through the Peter Greene Foundation. The Town of Haverstraw used the event to honor her rescuers that day. Stony Point also honored the two rescuers from that town.

The Hillcrest Fire Department and Peppermill South Bar in Congers held separate fundraisers for Badenchini, as have the Haverstraw Knights of Columbus, where Badenchini's dad and brother David are members, and David's Haverstraw Elks Lodge. Annamaria Badenchini belongs to the Knights of Columbus women's group, the Columbiettes, which is planning a spaghetti dinner benefit for her on Dec. 2.

"It's wonderful how everyone came together to help us," Badenchini says.

"What those four gentlemen and the community did," Rich Badenchini says, "puts Thanksgiving in a whole new perspective."